Biometric passports cloned. It seems all it takes is 174 quids worth of hardware and 48 hours of a programmer’s time to write the software.
Given the government’s track record for IT, is anyone really surprised by this?
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Magic bullet
Friday, November 17, 20065 Responses to “Magic bullet”
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November 20th, 2006 at 6:25 am
And not just the government surely. Most hardware and software announcements claiming to be secure seem to get broken pretty quickly (Apple’s iTunes DRM protection, DVD encryption,various wireless standards etc.)
November 20th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Are there any unreakable codes? If all codes have keys, and even if only one person has knowledge of the key, that one person is a liability - are there keyless codes? Time to send of copy of The Code Book to the Home Office…
November 20th, 2006 at 11:43 am
They are only a liability if you don’t want anyone at all to read the code, in which case you might as well just delete it…
Anyway, you don’t necessarily need the key to decrypt the data. A lot of research into breaking encryption targets the actual encryption method rather than trying to figure out what the key is…
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Without your knowledge of cryptography, I’d tend to agree with Katherine. If the code has a key and if there is a pattern of whatever complexity to generate that key, or rather there is a specific way to use that key on a set of data to make sense of them, it’s only a matter of time to crack it. Even if it would take a universe-age length of time by random guessing alone, clever pattern recognition and sneaky “that one person is a liability” methods surely mean it will come out sooner or later.
It sounds a bit like burying your treasure deeper and deeper in the ground, only to find out that your enemies are buying bigger and bigger shovels…
: P
November 22nd, 2006 at 11:08 pm
My knowledge of cryptography is very good. I learned it from a book.
Heh, no, actually the book that Katherine links to really is very good. Great narrative without getting too technical - excellent holiday reading. Much like In search of Schrodinger’s cat if quantum theory is your thing.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that the key itself is not necessarily the weakest link in the chain.
As a trite example, the Caesar Cypher is a simple encryption technique that moves each letter along the alphabet by a set number - that number being the key. So with a key of two, a becomes c, j becomes l, etc. The problem here is that it’s very vulnerable to frequency analysis in that given a large enough body of encrypted text, replacing the most common encrypted letter with e and so on will usually either reveal the plain text or enough of it to guess the rest.
Finding these sorts of shortcuts is usually how encryption methods are broken.